Dies on TikTok | Gramellini coffee

A girl from Palermo with a phone locked herself in the bathroom to participate in a challenge on TikTok. The extreme test (kids call them the swoon challenge) consisted of holding something around the neck for as long as possible. The little girl took off the belt of her bathrobe and turned it into the rope with which she ended up strangling herself. He was ten years old. At his age, and beyond, they locked us all in a room in protest or in punishment. When they met behind that door, the parents breathed a sigh of relief: we were punished, but safe. The digital revolution has also nullified the meaning of a closed door. Anything can happen back there now. A phone and someone are enough to provoke our children and grandchildren, exciting in them the desire to reveal themselves through the adrenaline of a challenge.

From James Dean to TikTok, each era has its extreme initiation tests and society has always faced the problem of limiting risks. Shutting down social media is impossible, even pathetic. Preventing access to children is difficult, because a digital native evades prohibitions with the same ease with which we flip a switch. The only defense, partial like all defenses, consists of giving general guidelines to the little ones that do not seem impositions. After all, fairy tales have always served this purpose: to warn immature lives of the thousand disguises behind which evil wolves hide.